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Recently I’ve found a blazing fast way to move/copy a website from one location to another. It’s so fast that literally you can copy an entire site to another directory or host while you are stretching your neck for a moment!

I’ve made a TON of mistakes in the short amount of time I’ve been online. And although I’ve made a nice passive income primarily from affiliate marketing, there are certainly things I’d do differently if I had to start over today…

In this multi-series affiliate marketing post, I’m gonna start with one of the “biggies” that cost me lots of time, energy, money and frustration…

I think MANY other Internet marketers make this same mistake, so hopefully it’ll give you some ideas of how you can enhance your own online biz.

So, what’s this huge mistake, right?

Here it is: not selecting the right keywords.

Simply put, keywords run things in the online world. Everything is based around ‘em, especially when you’re talking about the almighty Google.

Failure to fully understand keywords will inevitably lead to the following:

- Inability to rank highly in search engines

- Inability to get free organic traffic

- Inability to make sales of affiliate products or even your own products/services

Let’s take a quick look at how this shakes down…

Obviously, if you’re selecting keywords that are too competitive… then even with solid SEO, you’re probably gonna be buried on page 12 for about a year before anything happens (in terms of making the slow climb to page one).

Without getting to page one — heck, without getting to the top few spots on page one — you’ll never generate any significant free traffic… at least, not from big daddy “G”…

And without free traffic… and due to the fact that you’ve gotta have some seriously deep pockets to pay for traffic these days… you’re pretty much incapable of making sales and getting your affiliate marketing (or Internet marketing) biz off the ground.

Also, there’s another scenario and this is the one that adversely affected my biz the most: I knew enough to select longer tailed, lower competition keywords…

*BUT*…

… I didn’t understand SEARCHER INTENT.

Say what?

Meaning, I didn’t think about the commerciality (I think that’s a word) of the keywords I was targeting.

The end result?

I got lots of blog posts and pages ranked, but never made any sales. ‘Cause the visitors I was attracting were NOT buyers. They had no intentions of buying anything, so no matter how good my affiliate marketing sales funnel was, I had virtually no chance of converting any of these visitors into buyers.

As soon as I realized this fault, I immediately started targeting transactional keywords.

And guess what?

Instant income boost!

Cha Ching

Here’s an example so you can see in real life how powerful this understanding of keywords can be…

Affiliate Marketing For Beginners — The Power Of Keywords

In about 20 minutes I wrote this Gymboss interval timer review, which is nothing more than a little fitness timer I was using in my workouts.

With a little backlinking work, I was able to shoot this baby to the top of page one in Google for various phrases, such as: Gymboss, Gymboss Interval Timer, Gymboss Review, Gymboss Interval Timer Review, etc…

Even with a pathetically small $5-something commission, this page makes me over $1,000 per month on total autopilot. I haven’t touched it in months. (You can learn all this in more in my new private money making club)…

Funny thing is this page only gets a handful of visitors per day, since the search volume for those phrases is fairly low.

But with a 25-30% conversion rate… thanks to me using a BUYER KEYWORD (aka the name of a product plus “review”), it just doesn’t take many visitors to generate a healthy passive income stream.

Now compare that page/keyword to something like my “celebrity workouts” page that currently ranks #1 in big “G” and brings in far more traffic, but results in almost no sales…

Bottom line is this: to make money online, you absolutely have to understand keywords inside and out. Once you do… simply sprinkle some best practices SEO on top, and it’s fairly easy to start making consistent passive income online.

I’ll be back soon with another mistake that held me down when I first started my affiliate marketing business on the Internet…

This is Part 2 of the effective Traffic Getting Strategies my bud Brad Campbell let me share with you. The part one of these Traffic Building Strategy posts talks about about the mindset and “getting your feet wet” for building a boat load of visitors and turn your site into an income generator).

“Lazy Man” Traffic Building Strategy Guest Post by Brad Campbell

4. Pinging is “a Must”

After doing your comprehensive research, applying the simple on-site optimization and writing a super helpful post, you’ll want to make sure and PING that puppy upon publishing. Refer to 6 simple SEO tips and follow the instructions for pinging your blog posts.

This tactic is killer and it’ll allow your posts to get discovered immediately by the search engines (any post I write these days will be on the first page of Google within 1-2 minutes after publishing [for my long-tailed keyword] thanks to pinging…it’s that powerful).

5. BackLink Rocks

Be sure to link back to that blog post from other blog posts, using your keyword as the anchor text to the link. When all of these steps are followed correctly, you should be able to rank on the first page of Google for nearly ALL of the individual posts you write.

From there, the traffic compounds. One post may bring you 20 visitors a day and the next post may bring you 15 new visitors a day, and so on. Pretty soon you’ve got 20-30 posts that are all chipping in towards your total website traffic. It doesn’t take long at all to reach the 1k visitors/day mark and since your content will be straight fire, there’s a good chance of new visitors telling their friends.

6. ABLB (always be list building)

Encourage visitors to opt in and don’t be afraid to go a little overboard with this. Every page of my blog has at least 2 different opt in forms and I usually end each post by reminding new visitors to sign up. These simple steps have drastically increased my opt in rates. It should go without saying that you want to really hook these people up when they do opt in.

If you give them crap, you’ve instantly ruined your credibility and they’ll be less likely to come back and refer friends. But if you really go all out and give them some useful content/tools, they’re sure to stop back often and spread the word for you. You can take this one step further and offer your subscribers an ethical bribe when they register – tell them if they get 10 friends to visit your site and opt in, you’ll give them more free gifts. This works like a charm and it all leads to more targeted traffic for you.

If you’re struggling to increase website traffic, I feel your pain. Or, at least I used to feel your pain. I remember when Shingo finished my blog and I threw up my first few posts. My thought process went something like this: Damn, I’ve got a killer looking blog and I’ll be adding excellent content often, so people will pretty much find me and spread the word for me…that’s how I’ll get trafficto this bad boy and soon I’ll need a rake for all the dough I’ll be making.

After about 30 days of obsessively checking my Google analytics account each morning – only to see a few dozen lonely visitors who’d magically stumbled upon my site – I realized my thought process was dead wrong. The whole “if you build it, they will come” thing doesn’t work in the online world.

So I spent the next few weeks learning everything I possibly could about traffic generation. I read forums, traffic-related blog posts and even bought a few products from various experts. I learned a boatload of valuable information that served me well, plus I came up with some pretty cool strategies of my own.

Fast forward several months and now my Google analytics account doesn’t look so pathetic. On good days, I’ve gotten as many as 3k visitors from over 100 different countries…and the cool thing is that almost all of my traffic comes from organic search results.

I started with no list and absolutely suck at PPC (I learned this the hard way trying to advertise for my old in-person personal training biz), so what I’ve accomplished in terms of traffic can certainly be mimicked by anyone who’s struggling or just starting out.

Now don’t get me wrong – by no means do I think I’m da bomb and there are plenty of sites that would put mine to shame. In fact, I won’t be satisfied until I hit my goal of 10k visitors per day and an Alexa rank of 50k or lower…so I’ve got a lot of work to do yet. But, I wanted you to know that I did manage to drive a good amount of traffic to my blog in a short period of time…and I think you can too.

So without further rambling, here are some of my best tips to help you generate swarms of targeted traffic to your site…I call this the “lazy man’s traffic system,” since everything I’m going to talk about lets you get maximum amounts of visitors without having to do a bunch of work above and beyond your blog posts (like link building, commenting on other blogs, wasting time in forums, playing on Facebook and Twitter, etc)…

A few days ago, I’ve asked the winner of our “Win a Blog Contest – Dan Go this question:

An improvement to your site was by far the biggest (A whipping 221% increase in the traffic to his site from January) –What do you think separated you from the completion – could you share with us?

Dan Go is actually our very first premium customer since we started Fitness Website Formula last April. Now he’s dominating his local market with his bootcamp service on an auto-pilot, and getting a ton of business through his sites. Way to go Dan!

Without further ado, here’s Dan’s success story:

Guest Post by Dan Go

Hey there… I just want to thank Shingo and the team at FWF for awarding me the free blog. Since this is the Oscars I feel like I should do an acceptance speech but on second thought… I’ll just give you the straight goods on the Ninja strategies I deployed to increase my traffic by 210% in the past year.

So how did I get more traffic to my website?

I’ll do a quick rundown of all the things I did since getting the site: